Nilesh Gupta

I grew up in Faridabad — a small city near Delhi where life was simple and completely predictable. School, cricket, homework, sleep. No books, no startups, no exposure to much outside that bubble. What I had was math, physics, and a vague but persistent feeling that I wanted something more.

That changed in Class 10 when a professor from IIT Bombay walked into my life — teaching not for a salary, but because he loved energy and people. He showed me what the IIT brand could mean. I studied hard for two years, cracked it, and arrived at IIT Delhi feeling like I'd landed on a different planet. People had opinions on cuisine, music, films, debate — things I'd never engaged with. I felt like an outsider. But I did what I've always done: I found a way to fit in. I joined clubs, led the alumni relations team, talked to hundreds of alums, and somewhere in all those conversations figured out I wanted to build something.

I started as first hire at StoryProcess — a B2B startup helping sales teams tell better stories — then joined GrowthX and got properly hooked on consumer tech. Scapia followed, working on category growth in travel. Through all of it, the thing pulling me was never any single sector. It was always the same question: why do people do what they do, and what can you build on top of that? That curiosity eventually led me to investing. At Sparrow Capital I get to spend my days thinking about exactly that — which startups are built on real behavioural shifts — and back the founders who see those shifts first.

Away from work, I run a poker community (spotted the gap, built it, handle all the conflict resolution), spend too much time reading, and am always trying to find people whose stories I haven't heard yet.